My Personal Experience of The Effects of Vaping

Vaping is everywhere now a day. Over the summer I experienced a traumatizing life situation that changed my life for the better. Vaping was an everyday occurrence for me. I continued to vape without knowing the long term health effects that vaping would cause to my body. It wasn’t until I ended up in the hospital, that I knew the real effects of vaping.

I would have never thought I would become addicted to nicotine. As a child I would plug my nose and say “eww that’s gross”, every time I saw someone smoking a cigarette. Little did I know that vaping would be equivalent to smoking a cigarette. When I started to vape I viewed it as a clean new product that had tasty flavors to try, but I was completely wrong and misinformed. Vaping products were and are easily accessible and that is why I started to vape. It was my freshman year of high school, and I wanted to fit in. It was unlikely to walk into the school bathrooms without seeing multiple girls gathered in each stall watching smoke puffs cover the top of the stalls. Vaping was easy to get away with. All through high school I watched kids vape in bathrooms, in school hallways, and even in school classrooms without getting caught. Everywhere I went, everyone had them. Vaping felt normal and just something you do when you’re in high school. Everyday for about 2 years, I continued to follow the crowd. It is embarrassing for me to even type this out and share my mistakes with you. I slowly began to feel that I needed to continue to vape, no matter how many adults scolded me and how many news headlines about people dying appeared. I continued to vape without hesitation because I was addicted.

Eventually, my habit caught up to me, I had the biggest wake-up call of my life. I was on vacation and ended up in the hospital with a massive blood clot going from my left knee up into my lungs. Vaping was a huge factor in the formation of my blood clot. In the hospital, I was afraid, I was embarrassed and I never thought something so severe and damaging would ever happen to me. Now I know what you are thinking, this girl just vaped and got sick. That might be true, but that is not all that came from it.

Since the biggest realization in my life, I have and will continue to share my story. I want to make it known to others that just because you think it will not happen to you, I felt the same way, it can happen to anyone, look at me, it did! Spreading my story could help others not have to go through a similar thing as me. Enough is enough and I am taking my negative situation that occured in my life and am using it to inspire others to make better choices. Vaping is a huge issue among teens and I will not be embarrassed of my story; I am proud to tell my story in hopes to help others stop vaping. I have joined my school campaign called “We Got Something Better” to get involved with our schools vaping issue. I have also been advocating for stricter nicotine laws. I have spoken to representatives of the Governor of Arizona. I have also worked with Christine Kovach, a local city official to prevent vaping in my school district. In the future I plan to start a foundation. My foundation will educate teens and young adults about the health risks of vaping so that I can prevent teens from getting into the bad habit of vaping. I will provide resources for underage nicotine addicts.